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Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviousl

• trollbridge 5mo ago
  Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise. If data centre operators would fix these things perhaps people would feel differently. For example - provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby.
  • jeffbee 5mo ago
    I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.
    • 3eb7988a1663 5mo ago
      Surely I benefit from a host of things for which I want nowhere near me. Strip mining, petroleum refining, chemical processing, coal fired electricity, etc. Am I allowed any autonomy or must we all accept that if a rich group wants to plop down a leather tanning factory across the street, I should have no recourse?
      • jeffbee 5mo ago
        That's a mix of different issues. The site of a natural resource isn't one of the things that political systems control, whereas the site of a petrochemical refinery or a power station is chosen by those systems. So yes, it is obviously hypocrisy to consume petrochemical products while insisting that the refinery can't be in your "rural character" exclave with the arbitrary line drawn around it, but allowing the same facility to be built over the county line in the poorer, browner community that you consider sacrificial. Anyway, the impacts of a data center are not in the same ballpark as the other things you mentioned.
    • mindslight 5mo ago
      Maybe everyone in this village already has their own local AI rig. From a technical perspective, data centers aren't providing public goods - rather they're more like attractive nuisances that foster centralized control.
      • thewebguyd 5mo ago
        Mentioned earlier in the thread, but maybe these data centers should start providing public goods to the towns/counties in which they build? Free high speed internet, heavily subsidized compute, maybe partner with local colleges to offer labs & internships, etc. There's no reason they can't be economic accelerators for the towns they are in.
        • mindslight 5mo ago
          I agree it would help their image, but this all sounds like more corporate centralization to me. I've got a functioning electric coop that provides gigabit internet for a flat fee every month. I think they're even doing trial runs of 10Gb, but I haven't looked into it because I simply don't need it. Internet access can be a solved problem these days, where there is the political will. And if anything local colleges should be offering compute resources to the larger community, not themselves relying on scraps of generosity from commercial buildouts.
          • trollbridge 5mo ago
            With a new data centre, your electric coop rates can go up with no benefit to you whatsoever.
            • jeffbee 5mo ago
              In America electric rates are increasing due to 20 years of stagnation and failure to invest in transmission, and new data centers are on average associated with lower, not higher retail electric rates. This is because large consumers drive down marginal prices. In your country things may be proceeding differently, but that's the story here.
    • Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
      I kind of agree but I live in a city in Sweden. Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?
      • KptMarchewa 5mo ago
        Sweden has a bunch of data centers. Doubt any of them consume coal based electricity though.
        • Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
          Yup exactly :) It is all about how you plan, build etc how good you are.
  • thewebguyd 5mo ago
    > provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby. Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.
    • culi 5mo ago
      Gigabit internet doesn't power startups. It powers consumer streaming. As long as you can run Zoom, you don't need high internet speeds for startups
      • trollbridge 5mo ago
        You pretty much need low latency 1G+ to work from home these days.
        • weakfish 5mo ago
          ... do you? I have 500mpbs and both my partner and I WFH with no problems.
          • culi 5mo ago
            For group calls you just need 1.0 Mbps. If you want 1080p group calls you need 3.8 Mbps. Zoom itself says for a "reliable WFH setup" you should have "at least 25 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload" I've gotten by on McDonald's wifi
        • nixgeek 5mo ago
          I work from Starlink regularly and it’s just fine for meetings and everything else I do. Meetings are usually under 10Mbps of downstream and 2Mbps upstream. It’s simply false you need 1Gbps of “low latency” internet to work from home effectively unless your job is something like content production and working with huge files. Producing for OnlyFans? Benefit from 1G to send raw to your editor. Doing most other forms of work? Doesn’t require remotely close to this amount of bandwidth.
  • parineum 5mo ago
    This water usage meme needs to die. Although, it is nice to have an indicator for people who believe whatever they told without trivial verification.
  • RajT88 5mo ago
    I'm seeing a lot of pushback against data centers in my town, building where there is currently cornfields. I would disagree that it provides no benefit whatsoever. I ran the numbers on the proposed campuses, and at half price for industrial property taxes, it's at full build-out going to bring a billion dollars a year to the city. The property taxes I pay, which 73% of go to the local school district is about 108 million per year. Unless the city royally screws this up, my property taxes are going to go down. Only a tiny number of residents will live near the data centers. But, the opposition is massive locally here, and I've been trying to understand why. Talking to people in various groups, there seems to be more going on with the opposition than simple NIMBYism (although that's part of it). Some of the cited reasons are understandable - concerns about electricity. The state passed a bill to provide some relief, and there should be no water impacts locally here. > Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. We're talking Lake Michigan, which is where the local data centers by me will be sourcing their water from (our city and surrounding cities are switching from deep aquifer wells to lake water brought in via very long pipe). Forget the data centers (that's a drop in the bucket compared to the cities' usage), such pipes usually have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per day (MGD). That'd be able to drain Lake Michigan in about 35000 years, assuming no rainfall. Forget draining, how many such pipes do you have to build for it to start draining water faster than it's flowing into the lake? At 100MGD, 300 or so. So yeah, it's not infinite. Enough of these big pipes built out across multiple states could have an effect. IL is apparently limited to ~2000 MGD, and any other state bordering a lake (any great lake) has limits/usage far, far lower than that (Michigan is apparently 5MGD?). It doesn't appear to be too much of a concern. None of what's allowed would add up to taking out more lake water than is flowing into the lake. As long as the current limits are kept as-is.
    • jeffbee 5mo ago
      Given the predicted rise of Lake Michigan, and the predicted future volatility of its level, I would suggest that the cities and states of the region be building as many megascale waterworks as they can, and the energy systems to operate them. If they can get that money from data center builders, all the better.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  "a great site" -- you frame it like Microsoft was working for the public good
  • Danox 5mo ago
    This is the last stand for Satya Narayana Nadella Copilot has to work…
  • nixgeek 5mo ago
    Building a datacenter typically employs thousands of people in the trades, often for hundreds or a thousand plus hours, per person, from the start of a big build to the campus being complete. It’s quite literally millions of billable hours in trade labor. Modern datacenters also require very high standards of construction and are complex, so these projects create jobs and also represent a real training, upskilling and work experience opportunity for labor. There are many examples of electricians, plumbers and groundwork teams who did Microsoft’s site getting future work from Meta, Google or Amazon in the same part of the state because the experience has value. It’s easy to dismissively say datacenter is bad, or that it consumes too much water (despite many datacenters accused of this being a closed-loop cooling system), and ignore the billions of dollars spent during the project on labor which supports that local economy, or the improvements negotiated for the local area and paid for the hyperscaler, bundled in by the city/county planning as part of the permits and approvals. It’s also rare the tax for a campus is fully rebated, although it’s normal for the improvements to be partially rebated for some period (this is an investment incentive). Viewed over 20-40 years these sites are often tremendously lucrative in tax for the county/city as well.
    • SoftTalker 5mo ago
      There are a lot of jobs during construction. There are very few jobs during operation. Mostly site security and a few tech support staff. There will be some steady work for maintenance contractors, but that's much less than the initial construction.
      • nixgeek 5mo ago
• energy123 5mo ago
  One of the rare cases where nimbys can't do damage because the hyper scalers will (and are) building their data centers across MENA, South Asia and SEA where they're welcomed with generous tax breaks and incentives. Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!
  • expedition32 5mo ago
    Welcomed by corrupt politicians perhaps the locals not so much. Data centers do not provide jobs and they are run by sociopath Americans who couldn't give a shit about human rights or the environment.
• Scroll_Swe 5mo ago
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  • pessimizer 5mo ago
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  • HDThoreaun 5mo ago
    Water is a renewable resource. It actually is infinite if youre just using it to cool a datacenter, it does not disappear when youre done with it.
    • AngryData 5mo ago
      It does if that water is being pumped from underground resevoirs that take 100s of years or more to refill then heated up and evaporated away to rain down upon the ocean or run down the Mississippi to the ocean. I don't think people would care so much if they were using lake or stream water that got sent back, but often they don't because it isn't clean water which means more money spent on filtration and/or cooling system maintence.
      • HDThoreaun 5mo ago
        This is a good point and I agree it is important to place systems that use a lot of water close to renewable water resources. That being said, the vast majority of non renewable water usage goes to wasteful desert agriculture and there's comparatively very little backlash toward that. It just seems really dishonest to me to complain about datacenter water usage while ignoring the much larger source of the problem.
• 866-RON-0-FEZ 5mo ago
  > The data center would have been built in this scene You mean the carefully cropped photo of pristine rolling farmland in the article is in reality next door to a coal-fired power plant? Say it ain't so.